#50.8, Thurs., Nov. 16, 2023

Historical Setting, 610 C.E. Besançon Fortress

         It is the full light of day when I come up into the meadow.

         “Papa! You found the tunnel!  We’ve been waiting for you over in the trees there by the fire.”

         Greg and Gaillard are tending a campfire, waiting with the mule and wagon.

         I tell them all what I‘ve learned about the tunnels and the guards, the cage and the ladders, the basilica of the archbishop and the state of the other prisoners. I haven’t yet met with the Father to tell him our plan.

         Gaillard wants to hone the plan with these new details. He has so many questions, mostly about things I hadn’t realized were significant.

         “Does the cage door have a chain with a lock, or a keylock in the door? How many keys does the guard carry? Is there rust? What of the other prisoners — the ones in chains? Are those in need of rescue too?” Gaillard takes careful notes.

         “Yes. Everything is rusty and yet it is also sooty and greasy.”  Did I need to mention the stench?

         Gaillard is revising our plan to send all three of us as monks back in through the tunnel together, then we will split up when we are in the space under the cell, and Greg will go to the church via the tunnel, I will go up to the guard, and have him take me down one ladder and up  to the cage, and Gabe will stay hidden under the cell until the guard has come down and gone back up the other ladder to his post again on the main floor. Then Gabe can proceed to cut the chains of the other prisoners, as we had planned.

         Gabe asks me, “Why are they in chains?”

         That’s another answer I don’t have, “I don’t know. I didn’t ask their crimes.”

         “What danger are they if they are released?”

         “I don’t know. But clearly their own lives are endangered where they are. I would suppose the Father would want us to follow the pattern told of the freeing of the prisoners in the bible stories in Acts. And apparently, when God sends angels or an earthquake and releases a holy man, all of the prisoners are also set free.”

         “Does any of that make any sense to you?” Gaillard asks.

         “Do you mean as strategy, or as justice? It seems very reasonable as God’s justice, and when the bible stories guide us, chains are shattered by God regardless of human fears and sins.”

(Continues Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2023)?,